Professional Experience
Robert Chao Romero was born in East Los Angeles, and raised in the San Gabriel Valley town of Hacienda Heights. His father is an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico; his mother an immigrant whose family hails from the central Chinese province of Hubei. After receiving his B.A. in history from UCLA in 1994, he migrated to northern California where he received his J.D. from U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1998. While in law school he went through a deep period of "soul-searching," the end result of which was a calling to continue his academic studies and become a professor. He completed his Ph.D. in Latin American history at UCLA in 2003. He is also an attorney and Active Member of the California Bar.Before joining the UCLA Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies in July 2005, he was a U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Department of History and School of Law. His academic research is an indirect synthesis of his own cultural background and fuses his Mexican and Chinese cultural heritage. His current book project, The Dragon in Big Lusong: Chinese Immigration and Settlement in Mexico, 1882-1940 , tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community of Mexico. His broader research involves an examination of the historical relations between Asians and Latinos in Latin America and the United States, as well as an analysis of the more than 200,000 "Asian-Latinos" currently residing in the United States. He considers himself fortunate to be able to earn his livelihood by studying himself. The dissertation upon which this first book project is based received the Hubert Herring Award in 2003. For his next project he is delving deeper into his legal roots and has begun research on the important, but little known 1949 Mexican desegregation case of Mendez v. Westminster .